Heritage Plan

Include the Grand concourse trail system in the heritage plan

These trails were created as a gift to the people of the city to enjoy as pedestrian trails. They should be protected for future generations and not altered to accommodate bikes. The city does need bike trails but those should be part of the road/highway system.

Converting to clean heating energy will be a challenge for some heritage buildings. Reliable guidelines for all building types are necessary

Guidelines for conversion to clean energy

Heritage Inventory

We can't protect important places if we don't know what we have. A city-wide inventory is required to properly assess what exists and in what condition. From there we can determine which properties to recognize or protect going forward. Many Canadian cities have already undertaken this work. Toronto and Ottawa are both working on inventories.

Go beyond Style of Building Exteriors

Include more than just fashions in style in the approach to defining Heritage. Explore and educate the City on the architectural history of the details of style and identify those that were adaptations to environmental and structural conditions for expanded study. Go beyond the cover of the book and recognize important aspects of how interiors were designed, adapted and finished and the materials that were used.

Advanced technologies

Please include the use of advanced technologies that can upgrade heritage buildings that don’t require major demolition. These would include AeroBarrier to automatically find and seal leaks in the building envelopes without drywall tear out. Another would be AeroSeal that automatically finds and seals ducts from the inside without tearing out drywall. Both can dramatically improve building performance at an economical price. Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

view scapes and land scapes

Make view scape and landscape maps of the City and use them to inform land use planning in the City: e.g. a mapping layer that identifies places in the City that a member of the public travelling on the sidewalks by foot or on the streets by car can see the ocean, Southside Hills, Signal Hill. It is surprising and unexpectedly beautiful to find oneself lost in some suburb and suddenly see in the distance the magically winding road leading up to Cabot Tower and the ocean beyond. Figure out an equitable sample of these sites and integrate the protection of these views into a landscape plan that limits how development of the City proceeds.

City needs to encourage (not hinder as is done now) infill development that celebrates new architecture that will be future heritage.

Consider future heritage; build new “heritage”. Current development of the burbs will be just as ugly and unliveable 100 years from now.